When I was at medical school, hormone replacement therapy was not just the treatment of choice for the flushes and sweats of menopause. It was also thought to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, dementia, colon cancer, bone and even teeth loss.

Yet over the past few years new research has made many doctors reluctant to prescribe HRT in the longer term. Their concern stems mainly from a study conducted during the US Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a government-funded project to investigate the health of postmenopausal women.